What this discrimination against those who use the heavy-shrinking wool amounts to is making wool too dear to be put into the common grades of flannels, blankets, and clothing materials. The manufacturer is forced to find substitutes. Forty-four years ago, when the duties on the coarse grades of wool were first made prohibitive, and the manufacturers were forced to find substitutes in order to make clothes that the average man could afford to buy, wool rags, wool waste, and carpet wools were resorted to. They were wool, at least, and warm. Between 1867 and 1890 the annual importation of shoddy rose from about 500,000 to 9,000,000 pounds. Then the cry went up that it was displacing wool. Prohibitive duties were placed upon all kinds of wool substitutes. By 1890 duties so high were put on all the wool substitutes that they could not be imported; that is, after taxing wool off our backs—the wool substitutes were taken away. Deprived of the advantages which the inventions for using waste gave, there was nothing left but cotton for the bulk of the substitutes used in inexpensive goods, and cotton it has been ever since. The rapid absorption by cotton of the wool field has indeed been one of the most significant changes in American industry since the McKinley Bill of 1890. The tables of 1905 show that while from 1890 to 1905 cotton increased in the manufacturing of clothing materials about 100 per cent, wool increased only about 25 per cent. One whole department of manufacturing formerly classed under wool, is now placed with cotton hosiery and knit underwear. The decrease in the per capita consumption of wool shows still more strikingly the passing of wool. In 1890 we were consuming 8.75 pounds apiece; in 1904, 6.22 pounds,—_less_ than we used in 1860!
This astonishing change in the relative use of the two materials is not all due to the tariff on raw wool. Cotton is gaining the world over. The general tendency to lighter clothing, the demand for a larger number of garments, and so cheaper prices, the failure of the world’s wool production to increase and consequently its higher price—all have encouraged the change, but it is certain that the great determining factor in the United States had been this duty combined with a second mischief-maker—the ratio used in estimating the compensatory duty on all products of wool imported.